Photo: The fake passport of Jeong Su-il and Muhammad Kansu. Credit: Yonhap News.

The complex history of Korea’s division contains many colorful characters with convoluted personal histories, but few can have been as remarkable as Jeong Su-il 정수일, who passed away on February 24, after spending much of his life posing as a Filipino muslim named Muhammad Kansu, a leading Middle East scholar in Seoul - while working as a North Korean spy.

Jeong was born in China in 1934, before the division of the Korean Peninsula. He spent his youth in China and ultimately graduated from Peking University, with a stint at Cairo University in Egypt. After working as a low-level diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Morocco, Jeong decided to repatriate to North Korea in 1963, where he served as a professor of Middle East studies and personal interpreter for Kim Il Sung 김일성.

In 1974, the North Korean regime tapped Jeong to infiltrate South Korea as a spy. Jeong built out his false identity’s resume with teaching positions at colleges in Tunisia and Malaysia before enrolling in the doctoral program at Seoul’s Dankook University 단국대학교 in 1988. Jeong ultimately became a professor there, until his arrest by South Korean authorities in 1996.

Cover identity or no, Jeong’s scholarship was real and world-leading. With a photographic memory and fluency in twelve languages - including Arabic, Farsi, Malay and Tagalog - Jeong produced original research on connections between East Asia and the Middle East, including finding that the eastern terminus of the Silk Road extended all the way to Gyeongju 경주, the old capital of the Silla 신라 dynasty that existed in Korea from 57 BCE to 935 CE.

Jeong authored over 20 books, including a 2001 translation of the travelogue of Ibn Battuta - only the third-ever complete translation of the important tome, which also had French and English translations.

Jeong was sentenced to twelve years in prison after his arrest, but was pardoned in 2000 as his actual spying had not involved much in the way of confidential information. In 2008, Jeong established his own research institute, and continued his scholarship until his passing at age 91.